Robert Abel
| Place of birth = Cleveland, Ohio, USA | Date of death = | Place of death = Los Angeles, California, USA | Awards for Trek = | Roles = Visual Effects Director }} "He's blown it. He could have been off and running like another Disney, but he blew the golden opportunity." – Former associate on Abel's handling of the The Motion Picture- project, (New West magazine, 26 March 1979, p. 63) Visual effects (VFX) pioneer '''Robert "Bob" Jay Abel from Cleveland, Ohio, was the original Director of Special Photographic Effects (as VFX were still called at the time) on the film until March 1979, when he was replaced by Douglas Trumbull. Considered at the time, to be a revolutionary VFX cinematographer, Abel and his company, Robert Abel & Associates (RA&A), was approached by Star Trek: Phase II Post-production Supervisor Paul Rabwin for the VFX of the television upgrade of Phase II into what was to become The Motion Picture in November 1977. The first thing Abel did, upon consideration and invitation, was to inspect the Phase II studio models in their respective states of completion as well as the sets of Phase II on 1 December 1977, to see if these would hold up to big screen requirements. Having brought along his Visual Effects Designer Richard Taylor, they decided they would do not. (Star Trek Phase II: The Lost Series, pp. 69, 72) The studio's overtures came as a godsend to Abel, as his company was in financial troubles due to the fact that his acclaimed Levi's commercial had run hugely overcost (tendered at $190,000 the commercial ended up costing $330,000) and he needed the Paramount commission for his company's survival. His then executive producer Sherry McKenna revealed that, presented with an early script draft, an internal analysis for the effects production already revealed that the production of these could not be accomplished for less than $5.5-$6 million dollar, but Abel, fearing that this amount was too high for Paramount (indicating his lack of experience with major feature productions), decided to take a gamble by tendering a bid of $4 million dollar as not to lose the account. Incidentally, McKenna left RA&A in late December 1977 when negations entered into the final stages, as she did not want to become party to the deception. (New West magazine, 26 March 1979, pp. 59-60) His bid accepted, Abel and his company were contracted for the new movie's VFX the subsequent month, and one of the first things he did was directing test footage on the almost completed Phase II bridge set to ascertain VFX requirements. (The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, p. 202; Star Trek Phase II: The Lost Series, pp. 78, 104-108) What happened next over the course of the following year has become a subject of Star Trek-lore. When studio executives and producers, already leery since Abel had already officially secured and spent, over-budget expenditures of $750,000 and $220,700, as early as May and July 1978 respectively (which incidentally almost exactly accounted for the difference Abel needed and what he had submitted for the effects production), came to inspect Abel's work for the first time toward the end of December 1978 concerning the shooting of the studio models, they found no acceptable model effects footage. To aggravate matters, it was discovered on that occasion that RA&A had, in the studio's time and at their expense by using both the studio's equipment and money, continued to produce commercials (for Home Box Office, Perrier and Hitachi, totaling around three quarters of a million), as was conceded by RA&A's own executive producer for commercials, Jeffry Altshuler. Irate, the studio demanded that the company seized any side projects and be given a final budget figure for the effects, which at that point in time stood a $14 million dollar. Abel retorted that he needed $16 million dollar, and a desperate studio did reset the budget at that amount. The company was entirely pulled from the studio model photography, from here on end completely denied access to them, and which for the time being was reverted to Paramounts own cinematographer Bill Millar while Douglas Trumbull was concurrently appointed as an unpaid technical consultant in a last ditch effort to smooth over the increasing problems and conflicts. Trumbull, who was also at loggerheads with the studio, only agreed to do so as a courtesy to his old friend, the movie's director Robert Wise. Yet, being both headstrong characters, over the next two months Abel and Trumbull were locked in vicious combat with each other and Trumbull was ultimately not able to get Abel back on track and the situation proved to be unsalvageable by February. (New West magazine, 26 March 1979, pp. 60-62) The situation really got to a head on 20 February 1979, when studio executives and producers returned for a second time and reportedly only found a single completed effects shot ready for inspection. Aghast, the studio released both Abel and his studio two days later. (The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, pp. 203-204; The Special Effects of Trek, pp. 29, 31) No formal statements of what did transpire that fateful February day has ever been forthcoming from either RA&A or Paramount Pictures, which therefore has given rise to speculations. The most persistent speculation by far was that Abel misappropriated the funds to develop a sophisticated VFX filming rig, something Trumbull referred to when he, after belatedly being appointed to RA&A as studio liaison around Christmas 1978, remarked, "At the same time, Bob was already a year into the production, trying to implement a radically new computerized and computer graphics driven process." http://www.foolishearthling.com/files/I&T%20MoCo%20article.pdf, and was elaborated upon by former RA&A employee Richard Edlund, who stated, "I admonished him to keep it as simple as possible, because when the release date's breathing down your neck something's going to happen – it always does – and the more complex the system the more difficult it's going to be to fix and keep shooting. I don't know if Bob misinterpreted my meaning, but the end result was so overcomplicated it couldn't respond to changes without two days of re-programming, even though the problem might be something as simple as the magazine on the camera needing more clearance to avoid hitting the spacedock model." http://www.foolishearthling.com/files/I&T%20MoCo%20article.pdf Even before the company was released, two of his employees had already put if more crassly when they made the statements, "HeAbel's been bluffing, telling Paramount what he can provide. He has not completed a single final effect to date." and, "He worked to set himself up with the most fantastic special effects facility in town. There was a lot of theorizing, deadlines, flow charts and memos, but no action." (New West magazine, 26 March 1979, p. 62), an assessment reaffirmed five years later when reporter Dennis Fischer was told by another former employee that Abel had been fully aware that he not yet possessed the set-up for a project of this magnitude when making the bid, therefore spending most of the initially alloted money to acquire the equipment actually required for the project, leaving Director Wise sincerely feeling "being lied to" by RA&A, therefore pushing for their removal on that fateful date. (Enterprise Incidents, issue 13, pp. 25-26) Close collaborator Taylor however, put a somewhat different spin on the situation, when he stated years later in the 2013 interview given to Paul Olsen for the latter's second edition autobiography, "Well, what I found was fascinating was, that why Robert Abel Studios, which was really doing graphics and television advertising and so forth, was asked to do the effects for this film, because there was no track record for there. (...) So, to this day I'd love to know who has made the decision at Paramount to come to us, and say, "We want you to do the effects on this film". (...) Our original budget was 12 million dollars. But as they were changing the script, adding scenes, the budget kept rising. (...) There was conflict from the very beginning. And Bob Abel, who was one of the top sales men in the history of film, would go in there, and we'd get involved in more things than we should have ever been. We were initially there to do the models and the model photography, but we got involved with the sets, we got involved with the costumes, and all these other things, we never should have been, and that was a real problem. (...) They kept changing the script, not realizing how much changing the writing of the script affects the budget of it." The VFX budget reset at $16 million dollar by the time the final inspection occurred, the extent of the damage for Paramount, in terms of money actually spent, was ultimately revealed in 2000 by then former studio head Barry Diller, the chief financial overseer on the movie, who stated, "The studio poured $11 million into effects, and none of it worked.", and which amounted to nearly three times Abel's original bid. (Keys to the Kingdom: The Rise of Michael Eisner and the Fall of Everybody Else, 2000, Chapter 6) For Abel the situation went from bad to even worse when, informed that he had sold off some by Paramount paid equipment, auditors started a criminal investigation, whether or not this was the case. The results of this investigation have never been disclosed. (New West magazine, 26 March 1979, p. 63) Abel in turn threatened to sue the studio over perceived injuries sustained by Robert Wise. The otherwise levelheaded Wise, reportedly lost it on that fateful day and erupted in a full-blown rage. Studio executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, confirming the incident, was hardly perturbed, "That much is true, Abel has said he's going to sue us because of Wise's statements. And I say, let him. Problems with special effects have caused various scenes to be reshot, driving up the cost considerably higher." It is not know if Abel had, if at all, followed up on his threat. (Reader magazine, 23 November 1979, p. 7) As no other formal statements have been forthcoming, Trumbull's, Edlunds's and Taylor's statements to date should, due to their close association with RA&A, be considered the most seemly ones. Career outside Star Trek Hailing from the mid-west, Robert Abel started out doing film work with Saul Bass, working uncredited on the titles for Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and camera operating for the father of computer animation, John Whitney. http://citinite.wordpress.com/2007/12/28/robert-abel-associates/ He subsequently worked as a documentary maker, accumulating credits as Producer/Writer/Director for such productions as The Prime Time (1960), By the Sea (1963), A Nation of Immigrants (1967), Sophia: A Self-Portrait (1968), Making of the President 1968 (1969), Elvis on Tour (1972) and Let the Good Times Roll (1973). Yet, by the time of Let the Good Times Roll, Robert Abel's interest had already shifted to the production of the VFX aspects of motion picture productions, not in the least due to some uncredited work he did perform for the 1968 science fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. There he met his long-time partner Con Pederson who interested Abel in creating " " effects used in that movie. Together with his now friend Pederson, Robert Abel founded RA&A in 1971, which was to become a contemporary pioneering company employing the newest techniques in creating VFX, including the aforementioned slit-scan photography, and the earliest computer generated imagery (CGI). Initially the company employed these kind of techniques for producing groundbreaking commercials, among others for the beverage 7-Up and the clothing brand Levi's, before branching out to motion picture productions. In those years the company experimented with the use of the Evans & Sutherland vector graphic computer in order to pre-visualize effects shots, called "animatics", digitally, an innovative approach at the time. Eventually, it enabled employee Bill Kovacs (the later founder of Wavefront Technologies, a company developing CGI software) to shoot imagery right off the E&S screen, which yielded unprecedented "pseudo-3D" CGI. Abel was tinkering with this technique at the time of Star Trek movie, but it proved to be too far ahead of its time for practical application in motion picture productions, contributing to the problems described above. Nevertheless, Abel succeeded in making the technique work a few years later for TRON. http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/dcp/news/remembering-robert-abel/43276 Abel considered himself an artist first and a businessman second and this had repercussions, as he did not fully fathom the financial consequences of his cutting-edge techniques, and commercial production ran frequently overtime and over-budget, causing friction and irritation with clients, who started to take their business elsewhere by the time Paramount approached the company in late November 1977. Abel had to frequently ask his clients to cover the extra expenditure incurred, and when they balked, the company absorbed these themselves. Executive Producer Sherry McKenna clarified, "Bob Abel was interested in art. The fact that his company went from black to red did not interest him. What interested him was that his Levi's commercial rated higher than any other." (New West magazine, 26 March 1979, p. 60) One of the first motion picture projects they worked on was Disney's The Black Hole (1979), for which they produced promotional materials and the opening sequence, before they were contracted to provide the VFX for The Motion Picture. Despite their reputations being somewhat marred by the The Motion Picture failure, RA&A, and more specifically its founder, were held in the highest esteem by professionals working in the field of VFX, particularly for its capacity to serve as a breeding ground for future talents. Likened to an "Obi Wan Kenobi for his ability to inspire creative people", VFX technician Kenny Mirman has stated on Robert Abel and his company, "We were making it up as we went along. Bob built the best playground possible." http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/dcp/news/remembering-robert-abel/43276 A large multitude of VFX specialists, who attained fame later on in their careers, either got their break in the motion picture industry, or were able to further hone their budding skills at the company. Apart from the already mentioned Star Trek alumni, others who have at one time or another worked for the company at the start of their careers included, John Dykstra, Dave Stewart and Robert Legato. Many former, predominantly post-''Motion Picture'', employees went on to found their own VFX companies to continue the pioneering work in CGI, and other techniques, which were among others, Boss Film Studios (by the above mentioned Richard Edlund), Image G (by employee Tom Barron), Kroyer Films, Metrolight, Rhythm and Hues, Santa Barbara Studios (by employee John Grower), Sony Imageworks, Video Image/VIFX (by employee Richard Hollander), and others, many of them yet to work on the Star Trek franchise. After the ill-fated Motion Picture-project, Abel oversaw the company's productions of the VFX for High Fidelity (1982), Disney's critically acclaimed TRON (1982), Breakin (1984), the LaserDisc videogame Cube Quest (1983), and Steven Spielberg's television series Amazing Stories (1985-1986). In 1986 RA&A entered into a merger with Toronto-based Omnibus Computer Graphics, Inc., but went out of business the following year as Omnibus defaulted on its investment. Afterwards, Abel returned to his Writer/Producer roots and chalked up a few more credits as such with productions like The Mind's Eye (1990) and Quincy Jones on Jazz (1994). Robert Abel's pioneering VFX work did not go unnoticed as he did receive a 1985 "(Annie Award:) Winsor McCay Award" as well as a posthumously 2005 Georges Méliès Award. Abel himself passed away in late September 2001, at the age of 64. In hindsight, it was the above quoted former associate who unwittingly provided Abel, directly after The Motion Picture in February 1979, with the perhaps most fitting coda, "He's blown it. He could have been off and running like another Disney, but he blew the golden opportunity." Further reading * "Abel Neglex Trex Effex", Jeffrey Kaye, New West magazine, 26 March 1979, pp. 58-63 External links * * *2001 eulogy on Robert Abel, at Digital Content Producer.com *"Abel Neglex Trex Effex" online version at CineFiles Category:Special and Visual effects staff